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Australian hackers take to the iPhone

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Something we did not know: There is a vast hacker community in Australia. They’ve apparently worked wonders with the Internet, Unix, and TiVo, making them more accessible to the masses. So it only makes sense that they’d make the iPhone one of their projects. Never mind that it’s not available in the country — Apple won’t even ship it there via Internet orders. That hasn’t stopped them. And so Australia is seeing a growing number of iPhones running on their prepaid networks.
Why prepaid? Because the people most interested in the iPhone — teenagers and 20-somethings — typically use prepaid because they “cannot afford post-paid mobile contracts.” Good for them. We figure that being in a two-year commitment at such a young age is another reason for this demographic to avoid post-paid.

The process is rather simple. Australian hackers order the phones from Apple and have them delivered to a U.S. address. The people at these addresses then charge a small fee to ship the phones over to Australia.

Combine this with easy-to-find unlocking sites (just look at all the Google results), and you have a bunch of small businesses in the country whose sole purpose is to unlock and distribute iPhones.

“We love the rush of taking a big company like Apple and opening up it’s technology for the masses to use” said one of the teenage kids.